A Method for Heterogeneous Spatio-Temporal Data Integration in Support of Marine Aquaculture Site Selection

Abstract

Aquaculture site selection, like most site suitability analyses, requires the assembly and combination of multiple variables. Geographic information systems GIS and multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) based approaches are commonly used for aquaculture site selection and demonstrate the integration of various information sources relevant for siting aquaculture. These analyses, however, tend to be one-time and result in a fixed site suitability plan. Within a dynamic marine environment experiencing potential regime shifts, a siting support tool that integrates new and evolving spatio-temporal data has benefits. This paper presents a flexible Voronoi cell-based GIS model for marine aquaculture siting. Rather than a one-time specification of suitable locations, the approach uses similarity measures on the characteristics of Voronoi cells to find cells with similar characteristics. We calculate a weighted aquaculture site tenure value for Voronoi cells that have been or are occupied by aquaculture farm sites. High scoring cells suggest suitable sites and serve as targets for similarity queries. We apply the approach to a case study on the coast of Maine using an R Shiny application to demonstrate the use of the framework for finding sites with similar characteristics.